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The software job market is going to split in two
Found myself in Backagården once again this weekend, building software for the international left. This has been a bit of a happy place for me for some time now. This weekend bought a surprise happiness bonus, when I realised how much fun I was having coding without access to my employer-provided Opus 4.5 subscription.
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Our NES needed a new 72 pin connector
Although thoroughly cleaning our new NES the other day was enough to get it booting Super Mario Bros, it wasn’t reliable enough. On a bad day it could take five minutes of fiddling with the position of the cartridge and resetting the console to get the game running.
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I got a commit merged into Helix!
After building lazyrename a couple of months ago I got curious about small ways of improving Helix’s built-in file moving functionality. The conclusion I came to was that a fs::create_dir_all() call would make a big difference all on its own, and so I set out to get that added. The pull request finally got merged this week, which I’m really excited about.
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Repairing an old NES
Spotting a dirt cheap CRT television in a second hand shop in Trelleborg last weekend set in motion a chain of events that led to a Nintendo and a copy of Super Mario Bros arriving in the mail. Only thing is, none of it bloody worked. I got the old flashing red light when turning it on, and once blowing in the cartridge didn’t sort it I was out of ideas. Fortunately I found a very helpful YouTube video that walked me through fixing it.
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The new Swedish citizenship requirements
About six years ago I became a Swedish citizen. I’d been in the country around four years at the time. Being married to a Swedish citizen allowed it to happen early enough that Brexit never actually cost me my EU citizenship. Pretty nice! But if the new rules being introduced this year had applied back then I think I’d still be waiting today.
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The 2G and 3G network shutdown in Sweden is kind of a fiasco
My Nokia 2660 is being forcibly disconnected next week due to the shutdown of the 2G and 3G mobile networks in Sweden. It does support 4G VoLTE, but there’s some kind of technicality about making emergency calls over 4G that the operator claims it falls short of compliance with.
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C# LSP in Helix on macOS
Found myself writing C# in Helix on macOS a bit lately. Weird combination. It took a moment to tweak things so that it all plays nice together.
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Minneapolis can happen in Malmö
The violent repression of the population of Minneapolis has been horrifying. It feels unreal, like the news in an apocalyptic movie. And from the Swedish perspective there’s a dangerous tendency towards exceptionalism that makes people underestimate the potential for it to happen here.
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PICO-8 language server for Helix
Been working on this one PICO-8 game on and off for like five years now. Having switched to Helix since the last time I touched it, I needed to set up the PICO-8 language server for Helix first. It felt like nobody had glued together this combination of tools before.
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Ten Years of Sweden
This year I’ll have been living in Sweden for ten years. That’s a full quarter of my life. So when I found myself on a Stockholm trip this month I took the opportunity to stay in the same hotel as I did the very first night I spent here ten years ago.
Henry Catalini Smith
Software engineer based in Malmö, Sweden.
